Friday 22 June 2012 CycleStreets Android app is one year old

The CycleStreets Android app went live for public download from the Android Market a year ago last Wednesday. At the end of that first day there were a mighty 4 of what the Android Market calls "active device installs". As of June 20, there are 10,125.

Over the first six months, installs climbed pretty quickly for the first three months or so, then gradually plateaued at around 5500 active installs for the two months leading up to Christmas. Then Santa arrived. People obviously spent Boxing Day recovering, and then on the 27th of December they cracked out their new gizmos, installs ticked up and have continued on a straight line of about 30 new installs a day ever since.

According to the stats, about half of all installs are on Android version 2.3.3. Installs on Android 4 have gone from under 100 at the start of March to over 2,000 now. The majority of new installs are on Android 4.

95 people have rated the app in the Google Play Market, 79 of them rating it 4 or 5 stars. The people that like it tend to say things like "awesome" and "excellent". The more helpful feedback suggests the biggest problem people have is slow tile downloading. The less useful pick up on some specific quirk of routing locally ("Will not send me down ANY CYCLE PATH, even ones that are clearly show on the map") or overlook a feature it actually has ("many missing features including a proper way to save routes").

Other than "people are installing the app on their new phones and they seem to like it" I'm not entirely sure what these numbers actually tell us. I'm happy with that, though.

For me, it's been an interesting 18 months. I only started writing stuff for Android by accident, and I can't really remember how or why I offered to pitch in to the CycleStreets app. I'm glad I did – it's been good.

Thanks to Martin and Simon at CycleStreets HQ, to Theodore Hong who did the early work on the app that I picked up and without which I doubt I'd have bothered, to the other chaps who've contributed code and/or bug reports, and to those 10000 odd people wandering around with software I wrote in the pocket :)

Wonder where we'll be this time next year.

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Tagged code, and cyclestreets

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